Assassination at the movies

Taxi Driver, North by Northwest, The Manchurian Candidate, JFK – there's a rich history of assassinations in American film. But what's the difference between the accidental killer and the glamorously rebellious hitman?

Born killer: Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Columbia

It was Monday 31 March 1981, coming up to 2.30pm, and John Hinckley was fidgeting by the Florida Avenue entrance of the Washington Hilton, catching the attention of a police lieutenant who stopped to stare over at him. Hinckley jostled with reporters too, complaining that the press were always getting in the way, before finding a place to stand among the TV cameras. It drizzled, off and on, and the sidewalk was damp. His speech inside finished, President Reagan came out of the hotel, flanked by security men, acknowledging the few onlookers across the street and the small crowd of pressmen on the sidewalk beside him. For a moment, Hinckley asked himself the question: "Should I do this or not?" A journalist shouted to the president, and as he stood by the waiting limousine, Reagan raised his arm to wave. It was then that Hinckley, the assassin, crouched and fired – six shots flashing out in a couple of seconds. He was no more than 10ft from the president. Reagan heard what sounded like a "small fluttering sound, pop, pop, pop", looked suddenly serious, as though unable to believe what was happening, and then sagged; in that moment he was bundled into the car by Jerry Parr, one of his secret service agents; as they bent down to get inside one of the bullets ricocheted off the limousine and struck the president under his arm. The shot felt like an "unbelievably painful" blow in his upper back; Reagan didn't yet know that he'd been shot, but thought the pain had come from Parr falling on to him, so as to cover him from further shots. In the same flurry of bullets, three others were injured. The gunman kept squeezing the trigger, even though the barrels were empty. The news cameras recorded everything; within half an hour all the major networks were running film of the shooting.

Unlike most assassins from the French revolution to the 1960s, Hinckley was not a political extremist or a misguided idealist, but a film fan; he was not motivated by partisan contempt but by a celluloid-inspired yearning. He shot Reagan not because he hated the president, but because he adored a movie star. By assassinating Reagan, he hoped to fuse a mystical union with Jodie Foster, the act being an attempt to link their names forever. He wanted to claim her attention, but more than that to traumatise her. In a sense, Foster was the target he shot at, Foster the person he planned to assassinate. Shooting Reagan was a vicious approach to her, its aim to shock her out of her distance and her stardom, and to barge into the sacred aura of her fame. He had been stalking Foster for months, hounding her with letters and phonecalls that tinged romance with fury. If he had failed to fire at Reagan, he had planned to travel on to Yale University, where Foster was then a student, and either simply commit suicide or kill first her and then himself.

Hinckley remarked of the shooting: "I felt like I was walking into a movie." The movie he had walked into was undoubtedly Martin Scorsese's New York neo-noir nightmare, Taxi Driver (1976). This film obsessed Hinckley (during its first release, he watched it at least 15 times), and he imagined himself to be identical to its isolated hero and would-be assassin, Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro). Part of that identification meant his desperately falling for Foster in her role as the teenage prostitute, Iris. A college drop-out and failed pop star, Hinkley, by consciously playing out a movie character, endowed himself with some purpose and discovered some meaning in his own life, doubled as it was with the life that Bickle had led up on the screen.

Many commentators pointed out the discrepancy between virile, attractive De Niro and plump, gawky, besuited Hinckley. If a battle between youth and age had underlain the revolutionary spirit of the Vietnam years, then the new American assassin (such as Mark Chapman, the killer of John Lennon) was someone young, who by his very "squareness", his inability to be hip, resembled the grown-up "straight world". Yet Hinckley's social awkwardness, his lack of style, did indeed resonate with Bickle's position outside the world of cool. Bickle was partly modelled on the decidedly un-trendy Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of the racist presidential candidate, George Wallace. So it is that in Taxi Driver, it's the pimps and the prostitutes who are fashionable; Bickle could stand for the failure of many to adapt themselves to the essentially Californian "beautiful people" ideal that dominated American film, fashion and music in the 70s. Hinckley had tried to fit into the LA music scene; when that failed, he fell back on being Travis Bickle.

The story of American assassination effectively begins with the murder of Abraham Lincoln, a president shot by a second-rate actor in a theatre in revenge for a defeat in a terrible war. Hinckley's ludicrous attempt indicates that story's decline, with Reagan, a president who had been a Hollywood actor shot simply to impress an actress. All political meaning had emptied from the crime; there was simply a mad, unrequited love affair with an image.

On the night of Reagan's shooting, the FBI interviewed Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver. In time the film itself would become an exhibit at Hinckley's trial. Schrader remained clear that Hinckley's misuse of the movie should be no grounds for censorship. Such men were simply mad, and even the most innocuous of images could stimulate their fantasies. He pointed out that the apparently innocent Coppertone ad, showing a small dog tugging at a young girl's bikini bottom, was a picture beloved by paedophiles. And yet there was something more complex and less innocent at work in Taxi Driver. Scorsese had hoped that his movie's violence would shock the audience out of their connection to De Niro's character. Instead they plainly loved and welcomed the film's lurch towards mayhem; they turned out not to want exorcism, but performance. The exhilaration of violence was everything; they were electrified, not sobered. Moreoever Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro all likewise understood and to some extent shared Bickle's rage and loneliness. In taking on the figure of the alienated assassin, they found much in him that resembled themselves; both the film's makers and its audience were horrified and sympathetic, repelled and complicit.

The grey area that Taxi Driver inhabits has always been the zone in which assassins appear in film. There are two clear traditions for representing such killers; in both cases, the power of the films involved depends on a moral ambiguity that lets us identify with the assassin even as we question them. First of all, in American film, from the Danny Kaye comedy The Court Jester (1955) to Alan J Pakula's paranoid thriller The Parallax View (1974), we can trace the development of an unexpected character – the accidental assassin.

Such figures commit assassination by mistake, or are condemned as assassins when they are innocent or, most strongly, have been brainwashed into becoming killers. Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1959) presents an intermediate version of the motif. Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, is mistaken for a fictitious government agent and wrongly believed to have assassinated a high-ranking US diplomat right in the United Nations building. As often in Hitchcock's work, an assumed guilt plunges his star into adventure – nearly killed with a bottle of bourbon and a Mercedes, falling for a glamorous blonde on a train, shot at on the dusty Illinois cornfields by a plane, trapped in a Chicago auction-house, and pursued across the monument at Mount Rushmore. Through it all, his well-tailored grey suit is battered, bespattered, but always ready to be ironed and pressed. It's the symbol of his resilient urbanity, but also the uniform that the film tells us he must discard.

For all its Technicolor glamour, the film conveys national self-doubt. Popular psychological and sociological works of the 1940s and 50s lamented the decline of American vigour. Having told the nation How To Win Friends and Influence People (1937), Dale Carnegie's newest book informed us How To Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948). It was precisely the capacity for spontaneous life that seemed in peril. America's nemesis was "the man in the grey flannel suit", the "white collar" worker, the "organisation man", the "other-directed" member of David Riesman's influential treatise, The Lonely Crowd (1950). The villain of modern life was the middle class. The new suburbs spread out, the old traditions were gone and novel conformities improvised there, a new orthodoxy for the quietly desperate. Of course, there was nothing new in believing the nation was ruined. The jeremiad, that doleful diagnosis of the contemporary world, was a long-standing American genre. It was the focus of the sociologists' and psychologists' attack that was new. Now the great sin was sameness.

It was central to the concept of the "accidental assassin" that it was the ordinary man who was guilty. Indeed his ordinariness was the source of the guilt. By being believed to be an assassin, Thornhill finds a route out of the facelessness of modern American life. He gets noticed; he is in the frame.

John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962) took the scheme of the accidental assassin one stage further, namely in the direction of chaos and hysteria. The film shows a group of captured American soldiers brainwashed by the communist enemy, with one of their number (played by Laurence Harvey) conditioned into becoming the perfect assassin.

It was the Moscow show-trials of the 1930s and more recently the Korean war that introduced the world to the practice of "brainwashing". The term derived from the Chinese expression, hsi nao, (literally "wash brain") and was imported into the west by the American journalist and cold warrior, Edward Hunter. In the late 1940s, Hunter had been scandalised by a Soviet film in which a human being was induced to share the same automatic reactions which Pavlov had evoked in dogs. To Hunter, and soon to others, it would seem that the communists were reducing human beings to the bestial. These fears were realised as Americans learnt of the effects of psychological and physical torture on allied prisoners of war and other "enemies of the people" in Korea. Before directing The Manchurian Candidate, Frankenheimer read as many books on brainwashing as possible; he was naturally interested in its military uses, but also firmly believed that on the broader social level all Americans were being brainwashed.

It appeared as though "mass psychoanalysis" was eroding the heart's privacy, that secret self shown to be just another carbon-copy of your neighbour's secrets. Many suspected that modern advertising and marketing borrowed brainwashing techniques. The individual was being "got at" by corporations and politicians. Books such as Vance Packard's influential study of psychological manipulation in advertising, The Hidden Persuaders (1957) exemplified the new anxiety. (It's worth remembering that in North By Northwest, Cary Grant played a Madison Avenue advertising man.) Consent could be engineered.

The essence of humanity was in question. In The Hidden Persuaders, Packard headed one chapter "The Packaged Soul"; in two separate broadcasts for the BBC, in March 1947, RH Stevens talked on "The Spirit in the Cage", and in January 1953, AH Farrar-Hockley, who had himself been a captive in Korean prison-camps, spoke of "The Spirit in Jeopardy". The liberty of the individual soul was being challenged.

The automatic assassin was one free of responsibility. He was an entirely emptied individual, merely an instrument. Drained of will, character dies. The Manchurian candidate's crimes are not his own; he does what he is told. In a few years, this obedience would look in the eyes of the "counterculture" as a fitting symbol for the mind-control they imagined to be work in the culture at large: their educations, the books they had read, the TV they had watched. Particularly, it looked like another form of the obedience that led soldiers to kill in warfare, playing the power games of "the military-industrial complex".

The accidental assassin theme resonated in the post-Kennedy era. What was different about Kennedy's assassination was that no one could make sense of it. Rather than understanding, there was suspicion; rather than certainty, there was only the event itself, replayed over and over, as in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). So it was that the deed had to be replayed as a paranoid narrative; the assumption being that there must be a conspiracy behind appearances that makes them make sense.

Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) was in effect a remaking of the "accidental assassin" theme as worked out by Hitchcock. But it was The Parallax View that most thoroughly set out the issues at stake. A journalist, Joe Frady (played by Warren Beatty) witnesses the assassination of a senator, and afterwards tries to connect the murder to the enigmatic Parallax Corporation. Frady believes that they are hiring and training assassins, but in fact they are tracking down stool-pigeons, finding violent sociopaths who can be conveniently scapegoated as the conventional mad assassin, while the real killer gets away with it. As Lee Harvey Oswald would put it, they're just "the patsy". And the audience is just another "patsy"; we too take the psychological test that Frady undergoes in his attempt to be accepted by the corporation. Like him, we are required to ask the question: are we potential killers?

Besides these dark intimations, the other major kind of assassination film has the roughed-out morality of a cartoon. In a report of perhaps doubtful authenticity in the Sun, the pop-star Rihanna mused about the possibility of an acting career: "I'd love to be an assassin. Either that or a lesbian. Maybe both. Hey, a gay assassin, there's nothing hotter than that." In its own way, her quote was tapping into a long-established outlaw chic. Assassins were sometimes cool because they were so cold, like the calculating murderer in Fred Zinnemann's 1973 film adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's thriller The Day of the Jackal. Otherwise assassins were viciously lovable "hitmen", hip because guns were hip; this taste for extremity and posing can be found at their strongest in a movie like Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita (1990) or George Armitage's Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). The photogenic qualities of the assassin soothed most of our moral concerns. In their implicit praise of action as such, these films echoed the origins of modern assassination, that had seen the crime as "propaganda by the deed", a pure act that transcended language, and offered the doer the redemption of immediacy.

From Bernardo Bertolucci's
The Conformist. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Maran Film

Yet other films had already dismantled the assassin's murderous "cool". In Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Zbigniew Cybulski, the Polish James Dean in dark sunglasses, plays the assassin as youthful rebel, impulsive, womanising and apparently affectless. Yet in the end, he hesitates to go through with the assassination he has prepared; though he ends up by killing his man, the murder stands revealed as a pointless sacrifice. Set at the very end of the second world war, the film expresses a revulsion with violence, a longing instead for ordinary affection. Otherwise in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970), style is a form of emptiness; here Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a would-be assassin who wants to suppress difference in himself, to act as though he were a Manchurian candidate. In a murderous society, such as fascist Italy, to want to become a murderer assumes the guise of an act of willed compliance. Assassination does not rebel against conformity, it confirms it.

To my knowledge, there hasn't yet been a film about Hinckley's attack on the president. However, it can only be a matter of time. (Could Jodie Foster be cast as Nancy Reagan?) When it finally comes, it will only be the latest in a line of movies that have replayed the dark history of American assassination: from John Wilkes Booth slaying Abraham Lincoln at the centre of DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), through David Miller's Executive Action (1973) to Spike Lee's Malcolm X(1992) or Emilio Estevez's Bobby (2006). Hinckley's attempt to be the new John Wilkes Booth had meant replaying Taxi Driver, which had in a sense replayed Arthur Bremer, who followed Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's killer, who has represented himself before parole boards as a kind of Manchurian Candidate, and so on, back through an infinite regress of mirrors. In such films, history gets rerun as an image, and so doubles our nagging worry that, in the minds of the assassins, an image is perhaps all an assassination ever was.